Outer Dark (5 page)

The young woman looked down, fidgeting with the bundle. No, she said. I ain’t needin nothin. I thank ye.

Well, the woman said. She opened the door and the night air came upon them again sweetly through the warm reek of the room, the whippoorwill calling more distant, the door closing and the woman’s steps fading across the dogtrot and the bird once again more faintly, or perhaps another bird, beyond the warped and waney boards and thin yellow flame that kept her from the night.

She laid her bundle down on the bed and took the lamp and the basin and soap and went out, holding the lamp votively before her and the heat rising pleasantly about her face. She watched the ground, going with care, the basin upright and riding her hip, slowly, processional, a lone acolyte passing across the barren yard, face seized in the light she bore. She found the well and set the basin on the stone pumpstand, adjusted it beneath the spout, took up the long handle and began to work it. It gave out a hoarse gasp and then she felt the long pull of water in the pipe, rising, glutting the iron mouth and spilling into the basin. She took the soap and lathered her hands up in a gritty curded paste, spreading it over her face and then dashing cold water after it, eyes shut fiercely against the soap’s caustic sting. When she had finished she rinsed the basin and took up the lamp from the ground and started for the house. The whippoorwill had stopped and she bore with her now in frenzied colliding orbits about the lamp chimney a horde of moths and night insects. Before she reached the steps she heard the rattle of his canvas breeches along the side of the house. Had she not had the lamp she could have seen him where he stood in the deeper shadow of the eaves watching her. She was upon the steps when he spoke.

Hidy, he said.

She paused and he entered the ring of light with such painful diffidence any watcher would have said he was about something of which he did not approve.

What is it? she said.

He stopped a few feet from her, his hands deep in the rear pockets of his trousers, scraping his feet on the ground like a man who has stepped in manure. Why, he said, I just seen ye goin in, thought I’d say hidy. Where ye goin?

Goin in.

Well, he said. Best not be in no hurry. He looked up at her, face tilted sideways and absurdly coy.

Well, she said, I reckon I best. I’m about give out.

He removed his hands from his pockets, locked his fingers and pushed them out before him until the knuckles cracked, raised them over his head and gripped the back of his neck with them. Kindly a pretty evenin, ain’t it? he said.

She looked up at a sky heavy and starless above them and laden with the false warmth of impending storm. It’s right dark, she said.

Now it is that, he said. Yes. It is a dark’n. He was looking all about him as if to see was it darker in some places than in others. You ain’t afeard of the dark are ye?

No, she said. I don’t reckon.

Shoot, he said. I bet you’re afeard of the dark. I bet you won’t blow out that there lamp. And me standin right here.

She watched him.

If you was to get scared I’d be right here. Bet ye.

Watched him above the glassrimmed flame, him standing loose and smiling a little.

I ain’t got no match to light it back with, she said.

Pshaw, I got matches. Go on. Let’s see if ye will.

I got to get in, she said.

His mouth snapped shut like a turtle’s but she was not there to see it nor the lamp to see it by, already mounting the hewn poplar steps soundlessly and still with her air of staid and canonical propriety, entering the house and turning slender and moth-besieged and closing the door.

She put the lamp on the shelf and sat on the bed. It was a shuck tick and collapsed slowly beneath her with a dry brittle sound and a breath of stale dust. She turned down the lamp and removed her dress and hung it over the brass bedpost. Then she unrolled the shift and put it on and crawled into the bed. She lay on her back very quietly for several minutes, her hands clasped above her stomach, feeling the slack flesh beneath her shift. Then she sat up and cupping her hand behind the lamp chimney blew out the light.

It was only a few minutes before they entered, stepping soft as thieves and whispering harshly to one another. She watched them with squint eyes, the man all but invisible standing not an arm’s length from where she lay and going suddenly stark white against the darkness as he shed his overalls and poised in his underwear before mounting awkwardly bedward like a wounded ghost. When they were all turned in they lay in the hot silence and listened to one another breathing. She turned carefully on her rattling pallet. She listened for a bird or for a cricket. Something she might know in all that dark.

   They set out in the morning with the first light, having breakfasted at the same long table on pork and biscuits in a pale gray murk up through which the steam from the food rose eerily. The women wore their sunday clothes, bonnets laid to hand for the trip, again saving the old woman who was still shrouded in the same voluminous material, neither dress nor housecoat but simply undifferentiated cloth in which she went shapeless and unhampered, moving in an aura of faint musk, the dusty odor of aged female flesh impervious to dirt as stone is or clay. They carried chairs out and waited in the chill dewfall while the boy took them one by one and set them in the wagon bed, the husband on the seat slumped and silent with the reins slack in his fingers and the single mule drowsing in like attitude, lifting its feet heavily. The women climbed aboard the wagon and took their seats, sweeping their skirts from under them against wrinkling—even the old woman by long habit—and when they were set the boy leaped up onto the box alongside the man and the man raised his head and turned to look at them, the five women sitting about in the housechairs with folded hands, then raised and let fall the reins and said Come up, and they surged forth in a mounting clash and rattle and advanced upon the road.

She was wearing the dress again and the shoes, the shift rolled into the same bundle with her things inside and held primly in her lap. What time do ye figure us to get there? she said.

Late mornin, the woman said, if this here old mule don’t die in the traces.

He looks to be a right substantial mule to me.

He’s about like everthing else around here, the woman said wearily. Here. Did I show ye this here quilt?

No mam.

She began to unwrap a package of its muslin cover and unrolled part of a large piecework quilt. If I could get these here girls to quilt we’d of had two or three.

She bent forward to examine it. The boy had leaned over the back of the wagon seat to watch and comment.

Last one I sold I got three dollars for it, but it was a double weddin ring, the woman said.

Thisn’s right pretty, she said.

The boy had pulled out the quilting and was turning it in his hand. I don’t see why anybody would want to give three dollars for a old quilt, he said.

No, the woman said, because you cain’t give it if you ain’t got it. Here, don’t black it to where nobody won’t have it.

The boy let it fall disdainfully and she rewrapped it in the muslin.

It’s tedious to piece one for one person by herself, she said.

Yes mam.

The two girls said nothing at all and did not appear to be listening. The old woman had turned her chair partly sideways and rode peering into the passing wall of wet shrubbery as if she held camera with something that paced them in the black pine woods beyond. After a while she leaned precariously from the wagon bed and broke a small twig from a spicewood bush, held it to her nostrils a moment and then with her opaque orange thumbnail began to fray the end of it.

They rode on through the new green woods under the rising sun where wakerobins marked the roadway with their foiled wax spears, climbing, the man jiggling the reins across the mule’s tattered withers, through a cutback and into brief sunlight where the old woman hooked her bonnet more forward on her head and peered sideways at the others like a cowled mandrill, her puckerstrung mouth working the snuff that lay in her lower lip, turning again, a jet of black spittle lancing without trajectory across the edge of the wagon and into the woods, descending, the man working the brake, the wagon creaking and sidling a little in loose gravel, onto the flatland again, fording a weedgrown branch where dead water rusted the stones and through a canebrake where myriad small birds flitted and rustled dryly like locusts.

She watched the wet wheeltracks behind them go from black to nothing in the sand, caressing the rolled shift in her lap. It’s a likely place for varmints such a place as this, ain’t it? she said.

The woman looked about them. Likely enough, she said.

The husband tottered on the box, sleeping. The grandmother sat leaning forward with elbows on her knees, her face visible to no one. They rode through the mounting heat of the summer morning in silence save for the periodic spat of the old woman’s snuff and the constant wooden trundling of the wagon, a sound so labored and remorseless as should have spoken something more than mere progress upon the earth’s surface.

There was a spring halfway to town where they stopped, the man halting the wagon in the road and the mule leaning his long nose into the water that crossed here and baring beneath the silt small bright stones, mauve and yellow, drinking and blowing peacefully in this jeweled ford. They got down stiffly from the wagon and entered the wood along a footpath until they came to a place where water issued straight up out of a piece of swampy ground and poured off through lush grass. The woman took with her the lunch pail, wetting the rag with which it was covered and replacing it with care, taking her turn to drink from the tin cup that was kept here upended on a nubbed pole.

That’s fine water, the man said. Fine a water as they is in this county.

She took the cup from him and dipped it into the dark pool, raised it clear and drank. It was sweet and very cold. She passed it on to the old woman who adjusted the snuff pouched in her lip and turned the cup to drink from the back side of it. When they had all drunk the man put the cup back on the pole and they started back down the path, the old woman dabbing at her mouth with a handful of skirt.

She had fallen in last behind the two girls and she was surprised to hear footsteps behind her. When she turned the boy was coming along jauntily.

I thought you’d gone on, she said.

I was up in the woods. Hot ain’t it?

It is right warm, she said, going on now along the narrow black path and him at her elbow awkwardly.

Grammaw I reckon looks right funny to you don’t she?

I don’t know, she said.

Still I bet she does. I’m used to her.

They went on.

Know how she done it?

Done what?

Lost her beak.

No, she said. I never studied it.

You’ll swear I’m a-lyin to ye but a stovepipe done it she was puttin up. Fell and sliced her off slick as a frog’s … as a frog’s belly.

I declare, she said.

They were coming out on the road now and he hushed and there was still the mule with his muzzle in the ford, untethered full in the road, his ears dipping and folding.

I’d think that old mule’d founder, she said.

Shoot, he said. That old mule’s got more sense than a … Shoot, he’s got all kinds of sense.

At the wagon she waited while they helped the old woman aboard and then climbed up after her.

Don’t a cool drink just set ye up though, the woman said.

There was a commotion to the front of the wagon. Goddamn it to hell, the boy howled. They could see him curled in the road holding his knee in both hands but there had been no one looking to see him swing up to the high seat with one leap as the drivers did or to see him miss his handhold and crack his knee on the metal step in falling.

Lord God he’s kilt hisself, the woman said.

He needs that mouth attended to, the old woman muttered from beneath her hood.

The man got down from the wagon wearing a look of martyred patience. He bent over the boy and forcibly removed his hands from his knee. The trousers were ripped in a small tricorner going dark with blood.

He’s stove a hole in his kneecap, the man said. The boy was lying on his side grimacing in histrionic anguish, suffering the man to slide the breechleg tight up on his thigh in chance ligature and poke a dirty finger at the laceration.

Tain’t bleedin much, he said. Just let me bind him—reaching to his hip and drawing forth in garish foliation a scarlet and blue bandana.

Don’t use that, the woman said. You ain’t got nary othern now. Here. She was bending and ripped loose a long strip of muslin from the bundled quilt in the floor of the wagon.

Give it here then, the man said, reaching backward with one hand. He propped the boy’s knee in his lap, squatting in the road, took the cloth and wrapped it and tied it. The boy hobbled to his feet and inspected the job before easing the leg of his trousers down. They mounted to the box and the man chucked up the sleeping mule and they went on, the boy upright on the seat, pilloried and stoic, the man slumped and brooding, and behind them the five women prim and farcical on their housechairs.

It was near noon when they came into the town, the mule’s thinshod hoofs going suddenly loud on the banked cobbles up to the rail crossing, one clear steel ring of his shoe on the polished bar and down again and again muted and dull in the unpaved street along which stood tethered an assortment of rigs with mules or horses and alike only in their habitude of dust and age and patience, the man now guiding the mule toward them with small tugs at the rein until they veered beneath the shade of what scantleaved trees lined the mall there and came to rest.

Well, he said, we here.

She was first down, holding the bundle to her chest and extending a hand to the grandmother who rose and looked about with disapproval before taking up the amplitude of dress that hung before her, ignoring the hand, gripping the rim of the high rear wheel and coming down it backwards ladderwise and expertly, alighting in the road and brushing down her skirts again and glaring out from beneath her dark bonnet fearfully.